What do you get when you take two parts director, one part actor, engineer, writer and animation enthusiast, and season it all with a small New England university? The answer is a 25-minute film noir-style movie written, directed, filmed and performed by sophomore Benjamin Samuels and junior Nick Pasquariello, two Tufts students attempting to make names for themselves in the world of filmmaking.
The duo met up in 2006, when Pasquariello cast Samuels to play a part in a film he was shooting for the Experimental College course "Making Movies."
"He and his team were far and away very striking for their class," Samuels said of Pasquariello, who won best picture at the Tufts Campus Movie Fest last year. This year, the two student filmmakers reversed roles, with Samuels recruiting Pasquariello to help with a piece Samuels is filming, tentatively titled "Down and Out."
The film will be a film noir, a style usually used to describe classic Hollywood crime dramas. Film noir is a style marked by the use of dramatic shadows and stark black-and-white. Samuels is the film's writer and director, and will star in it as well.
According to Samuels, the film needed just the right pair of eyes behind the camera.
"I hunted [Pasquariello] down this year just because he had a way behind the camera," Samuels said of his right-hand man. "He's very talented; he has a good eye - which is what you need to be a cinematographer."
Pasquariello said he jumped at the opportunity to work behind the scenes of Samuels' project, which the he referred to as "Ben's baby."
"He's very ambitious and very energetic," Pasquariello said. "It's sort of interesting because he's been doing film making a lot longer than me, so as much as I can add to the project, at the same time I'm constantly learning stuff from him ... I watch him dart around the set doing things and it just blows my mind."
But not every step of the filmmakers' respective journeys ran so smoothly: Both Pasquariello and Samuels came to Tufts with filmmaking at the back of their minds, vowing instead to concentrate on other disciplines.
Pasquariello, who began his career at Tufts as a mechanical engineer, recalled the internal conflict he experienced when he discovered that film was his calling.
"Back to when I was really young, one of the things I'd always loved was the show Transformers, so that's why I thought I wanted to do mechanical engineering - to make robots," Pasquariello said. "Then I realized that no, I like the animation aspect ... I kind of realized that [engineering] wasn't what I wanted to do."
Samuels, who acted and directed in high school, experienced a similar revelation after beginning his college career. "I came here [to Tufts] and I actually wasn't going to pursue drama at all," he said. "I was going to find a job that actually paid."
Yet Samuels quickly realized that own passion for drama and film was unavoidable. "I ended up auditioning for the first show that came along," he said. "I just realized that it was too much a part of me to let it go."
Samuels continued to act in various shows on campus and eventually landed a job in the Experimental College doing film editing, where he was introduced to his boss and Associate Director of the Experimental College Howard Woolf.
The fact that Tufts does not offer a film major served as no obstacle to the pair. In fact, each has found himself happier than he would have been at a more specialized school.
"Personally, I'm glad I did it this way because I've always done things unconventionally," said Pasquariello, who remains an engineer despite his hopes of getting into the film industry after his graduation from Tufts. "If I had to focus on film 24/7, it would kill me. I need the other stuff."
Samuels agreed. "What I love about Tufts is that it is a liberal arts college ... and I had promised myself I wasn't going to go to a conservatory ... [which would be] a shell in a lot of ways," he said. "You wouldn't be exposed to the variety you get at a place like Tufts - all the different minds, all the different interests, all the different life stories. I feel like this is where all the material can be made."
That isn't to say that the Experimental College hasn't provided both students with adequate opportunity to immerse themselves in filmmaking.
"Here you are at school, and we've got 10 cameras up at the ExCollege," Samuels said. "Which means that at any one time, 10 film makers could be making their indie film breakout. It's wonderful to be a part of that."
Both students also noted a growing interest in film making at Tufts and an improvement in the quality of the equipment used at the Experimental College, making the process of filming an art accessible to nearly anyone. "I can see Tufts possibly going in that direction where they end up having a full-fledged film program," Pasquariello said.
Pasquariello echoed Samuels' sentiments regarding the film industry's shift from huge motion-picture productions to do-it-yourself style movies.
"It's funny because we're at a really interesting time in media just because all the technology is getting so much better and so much cheaper," he said. "Anyone can make something that millions of people can see and because of that, some of the most conventional ways aren't necessarily the best."
